Departments
Arts
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Week of 24 October 1997 |
Vol. I, No. 9 |
Arts
Painting Machines at BU Art Gallery
The work of eight contemporary artists who explore technology's role in late 20th-century culture will be showcased at the Boston University Art Gallery from October 30 to December 14.
Painting Machines: Industrial Image and Process in Contemporary Art includes artists whose work depicts machines (Donald Sultan, Robert Moskowitz, Mark Tansey, and Lawrence Gipe) and artists who have created machines that produce art (Angela Bulloch, Liz Larner, Rosemarie Trockel, and Rebecca Horn).
"It seems that we humans are forever attempting to come to terms with our technological creations," says exhibition curator Caroline Jones, CAS assistant professor of art history. "We alternately look to them for salvation and fear them as agents of destruction. The exhibition examines our current ways of thinking about the technological, particularly in relation to that most human of activities, making art."
The artists in the exhibit, almost all of them baby boomers, view the machine neither with the naïve optimism of the Soviet revolutionary nor with the will-to-power of the early capitalist entrepreneur, she says. Rather, their works use machines to look back at modernist movements and activities in which seemingly neutral ideas of progress concealed deeper needs of technological power and mastery.
The artists demonstrate that "such dreams of mastery are intimately tied to the art-making impulse itself, just as the desire to make art is linked, deep in our psyches, with a love of technology as a way of making and unmaking the world," says Jones. "Exploring our emotional, aesthetic, and symbolic investments in machines, the artists in this exhibition make works that resonate with the largest issues of technology's place in contemporary culture."
In the exhibition, some of the machines that paint, such as Bulloch's Pushmepullme Drawing Machine (1991) invite the participation of the viewer. Others, such as Horn's Kleine Malschule (Little Painting School, 1988), totally eliminate the human hand from the act of painting, substituting the motor, ladles, and brushes of her machine. Larner's Wall Scratcher (1988) moves repetitively, scratching the wall of the gallery -- the only human intervention is to put the machine in place. Trockel's series of drawings, 56 Brush Strokes (1990), was created by her Malmaschine (Painting Machine, 1990) composed of paintbrushes made with the hair of 56 contemporary artists -- an ironic examination of the role of the artist-as-celebrity in the contemporary art world.
The paintings of machines and the Machine Age use images to examine the effects of technology on our world. In detailed paintings reminiscent of the industrial posters of the 1930s and 1940s, Gipe juxtaposes heroic images of industrial power with textual warnings about the danger of abusing such power. Sultan focuses on industrial disasters, such as the factory closing of his Plant (1985), and also uses industrial materials to create his paintings. Moskowitz's Stack (1979) depicts an inactive smokestack -- creating a powerful icon of the postindustrial age. Tansey examines the production of art as a mechanical process. In paintings such as The Raw and the Framed, he portrays art-making as an industrial process, and uses mechanical devices such as a photocopier in the re-creation of his images.
The assistant director of the Gallery, John Stomberg, points out that Painting Machines continues the Gallery's ongoing investigation of the machine as a visual and cultural entity with enduring meaning in the United States and abroad.
"It is the logical outgrowth of several recent projects at Boston University and